Internal Operations Manual Template

Your manual answers one question: how does this place run? Two neighboring documents, the SOP and the employee handbook, answer different ones. The US Environmental Protection Agency defines a standard operating procedure (SOP) as a set of written instructions that document a routine or repetitive activity¹. Keep those in an SOP library or an internal knowledge base, and link to them.

Write for one reader: a capable new hire in their second week, once logins and paperwork are sorted. Aim for something they can read in an afternoon.

It is tempting to start from a blank outline and a round of interviews. Records make a better start, because people describe how work should go, while calendars and invoices show how it does. Save the interviews for explaining what the records show.

1. 1

   Pull the org chart

   Note who each team reports to. You will test it against the minutes later.

2. 2

   Export the meeting calendar

   Take three months of recurring meetings, with organizers, attendees, length and frequency.

3. 3

   Export the software list

   List every app and seat in your single sign-on or identity system, plus tools paid for on company cards.

4. 4

   Collect policies and minutes

   Gather every written policy, plus the agendas or minutes of each recurring meeting.

If a record is missing, say so in the manual instead of guessing. A manual marked incomplete beats one that quietly fills the gap.

List the decisions that come up again and again, such as spending, hiring, pricing and policy exceptions. Give each a single owner. In a RACI chart (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed), as Cornell University's IT team defines it, each decision has only one accountable person².

Then test the org chart against the record. Who chaired the last four meetings where the decision came up, and whose name is on the approvals? Where the two disagree, write down both and ask the people involved. The gap may be a sensible handoff nobody wrote down.

Mark how much care each decision needs. In his 2015 letter to shareholders³, Amazon's Jeff Bezos called irreversible or nearly irreversible decisions one-way doors, to be made slowly and with great deliberation. Most decisions, he wrote, are reversible two-way doors, which "can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups."

Meetings are where many decisions get made, and they take up much of the week. In a 2017 Harvard Business Review article, Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School and two co-authors cite research showing that executives average nearly 23 hours a week in meetings⁴. In the 1960s it was less than 10.

For each recurring meeting, write down its purpose, chair, attendees and frequency, and whether it decides things or only shares information. Then work out its cost in person-hours: a weekly hour-long meeting of 8 people costs 8 person-hours a week, roughly 400 a year.

For a new hire, the decides-or-informs column matters most. It tells them where to bring a question that needs an answer, and which meetings they can follow from the notes. If an issue keeps coming back undecided, track it in a weekly business review that counts the weeks it has gone without a decision.

Work through the software list one tool at a time. Record seats, monthly cost, owner, purpose and how many seats are actually in use.

In a 2024 report, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked at nine federal agencies with large IT budgets. None had fully determined whether their five most widely used software licenses were over- or under-purchased⁵. The two key activities GAO names apply just as well to a small company: track the licenses in use, and regularly compare them with purchase records.

Search your meeting agendas and policies for each tool's name, then sort every tool into one of three groups.

• Load-bearing: named in a meeting, policy or procedure, with an owner
• Personal: one seat, one person's choice, no explanation needed
• Unexplained: a team-wide license that no meeting or policy mentions

Open with a one-page overview: what the company does, how work passes from sales to delivery to billing, and where each section fits. Write the rest as you would explain it over coffee, using the real names of meetings, tools and people.

Test the draft on someone who didn't write it. The EPA's guidance on procedures says it is especially helpful when drafts are tested by people other than the original writer¹. For a manual, that is your most recent hire. Ask what it still doesn't answer, and add it.

Keep it true after that. GitLab, which publishes its company handbook online, says its handbook "is what we do right now"⁶, not what it hopes to do or did months ago. Update the manual when a chair changes, a meeting starts or stops, or a tool is bought or cancelled.

To skip the blank page, start from the template at the top of this page. Edit with AI opens it in River, which checks your tool list against your meetings and policies, then drafts the four documents.